


where you go i'm going

by thedisasternerd



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Canon Queer Character of Color, Canon Queer Relationship, Crusades Era Joe | Yusuf al-Kaysani & Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Falling In Love, First Kiss, Idiots in Love, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani is an Incurable Romantic, M/M, Mutual Pining, Pining, Pre-Canon, Religious Discussion, Sharing a Bed, Yeah that's more like it, all that good content, but they only had the presence of mind for one wikipedia article and a few meta posts, i cannot express just how satisfying it is to use those tags, nicky is just as bad he just has a lid on it, the author tried their best to be historically accurate, you know how it goes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-28
Updated: 2021-01-28
Packaged: 2021-03-14 05:40:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29041032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedisasternerd/pseuds/thedisasternerd
Summary: Yusuf realises that he is in love in the mountains.It is colder than he is used to. Niccolò does not seem to mind, although he sometimes shivers in his (stolen) clothes like a drowned rat.For the four years - or is it six? ten? he cannot tell and he does not care how long it is, so long as Niccolò is by his side - that they have been travelling, most of his contemplative thoughts have fallen into one of two categories. The first is their Affliction and everything that goes with it.The second is, of course, Niccolò di Genova and everything about him.---Yusuf falls in love, slowly but surely.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, background quynh/andy - Relationship
Comments: 19
Kudos: 286





	where you go i'm going

**Author's Note:**

> disclaimer: I did my absolute best to stick to a semblance of historical accuracy, but it is difficult to a) find credible sources on MENA culture b) find sources on being gay and attitudes to homosexuality in this specific period of time and c) actually read the articles I did find (and that's on having mental issues). Please, if anything is wildly inaccurate, do tell me - I was purposefully as vague as possible to avoid that, but nonetheless.
> 
> anyway: these two lovestruck fools have taken over my brain. I watched the movie a couple days ago and wrote this in the following haze of 'new hyperfixation'. I hope I did them justice and that you enjoy reading

“I am tired.” Niccolò’s Greek is barely passable, but they make do. Yusuf can hardly boast about his Latin, so he supposes that it makes them even. “Yusuf. I am _tired_.”

It is always startling, when Niccolò says his name. Startling in the same way that the man’s eyes are a peculiar colour and in the same way that Niccolò had once managed to ram his sword straight through Yusuf’s armour, right into his heart, the sky burning in his eyes.

It’s symbolic, he supposes, watching Niccolò watch him. Symbolic how this bedraggled, persistent man is the only constant left in Yusuf’s life. Symbolic that of all the things, of all the souls, Niccolò di Genova was the one chosen to keep stride with Yusuf. The one to stab his back and protect it at the same time. 

“We can hardly fight for all eternity.” Niccolò carries on, turning to stare over the sands. He is a hawk, Yusuf thinks, looking at the man’s profile, but then takes it back. No. Niccolò is no hawk. “I am tired of it. We have been cursed, or perhaps blessed, with eternal life, and we choose to spend it by spilling each other’s blood?”

Yusuf stays silent. Niccolò gets to his feet, too fast for him to be graceful about it, and yanks his sword out of its scabbard. His gaze fixes on Yusuf’s, glinting painfully in the firelight, and then rips away as he plunges the sword into the sand, a hand’s breadth away from Yusuf’s feet.

“I do not want to fight you anymore.” Niccolò’s hands ball, trembling, into fists. Empires are falling in him, burning to the ground with every second of Yusuf’s silence. The fires are beautiful and Yusuf wonders if the ash they leave behind will be the colour of the sky. “Besides, where is the honour? But if I am alone in this, then strike me down and leave me here.”

Yusuf looks at him. _Really_ looks at him: sees the old scars and the barely-there insignia of the Franks that he has seen Niccolò scrubbing off his leather belt with sand. Sees the trepidation, the fear, the rawness in the man’s expression.

He stands up. He is perhaps two fingers’ width taller than Niccolò, and he is broader, too: but Niccolò fights like a street rat, his evident lack of experience more than made up for in sharp elbows and his talent for stabbing a weapon into the right places. 

He takes his own scimitar into his hand, feeling the comforting weight of it. Niccolò swallows visibly, the taut skin of his face shining faintly in the firelight.

But rather than taking Niccolò’s head off with it, as he once would have done, Yusuf gets down on his knees, hears Niccolò’s sharp inhale of surprise, and smiles grimly. 

He does not stab Niccolò in the stomach, or cleave him in half. Instead, he lays his sword gently at Niccolò’s feet and bows his head.

“I do not want to fight you, either.” He tells the shifting sands.

Before he can say anything more, Niccolò drops to his knees, too. He may not be a hawk, Yusuf realises with not a small amount of amusement, but he is some kind of bird, peering awkwardly into Yusuf’s face as he is.

“Then we are at peace?” 

Yusuf nods. “More than that. We are both warriors. We can no more avoid that than we can die. Fight by my side, Niccolò. Fight with me, fight at my back, and I will be the same to you.”

He looks up, inexorably, gazes into the turbulent flicking of the other man’s eyes.

“You have me,” Niccolò breathes, as fervent as he had no doubt once been in prayer. “you have me, Yusuf.”

They knock their heads together, not saying a word more.

It is enough, for now.

* * *

And so, they fight. Not each other but side by side and back to back.

But mostly, they just live. Niccolò gets better at Greek and tries his hand - or, well, tongue - at Yusuf’s own language, which is something that Yusuf frequently brings up as a point against him when they tease each other. Yusuf patches up his Latin and learns bits of Niccolò’s native dialect - mostly obscenities that Niccolò laughingly explains to him with a mix of crude gestures and words. 

“ _Say it again,_ ” _Niccolò was nothing short of gleeful as he poked Yusuf in the shoulder._

_Yusuf, ever unable to resist for some unfathomable reason, said it again._

_Niccolò howled with laughter._

_"I am not saying what you told me I am saying, am I?"_

_That got him another handful of giggles. Yusuf, indignant and irritated, seized Niccolò in a headlock and swung him round. The bastard was still laughing._

_"You said," Niccolò wheezed, face going red, "that-"_

_He started laughing again, going limp in Yusuf's grip and beating a fist against his own thigh as he threw his head back against Yusuf’s shoulder. His legs scrabbled weakly on the stone ground._

_“You-” Niccolò made a circle with one hand and stabbed a finger into it. Of course. “You-”_

_He was laughing too hard to do much more than make gestures. But, by the way he crooked his fingers, Yusuf had a pretty good idea of what Niccolò had taught him to say._

_“Did you teach me how to say ‘I fuck goats’ or something equally juvenile?”_

_Niccolò dropped like a stone onto the ground when Yusuf released him, then curled into a ball and laughed and laughed and laughed._

_Yusuf found himself smiling widely, amused despite himself. Niccolò’s mirth was oddly contagious._

_“You are disgustingly infantile.” He told Niccolò’s gasping form. It only made the Frank burst into fresh hysterics._

_“You’re,” he managed, choking, “_ you’re _disgusting- disgust- disgustingly infantile-”_

_“I’m leaving without you.” Yusuf said with a sigh, and turned back to packing up camp with one last gentle kick to his companion’s back._

When they find themselves on main roads, though, they must also keep themselves quiet. Niccolò hides his face under the hood of the cloth chainmail covering he never managed to get rid of and never shows his eyes, his role as Yusuf's shadow coming naturally to him. But Yusuf too has to keep his head down and his sword near at hand. 

Their journey takes them out of the Holy Lands and into the heart of the Byzantine empire, where they can travel more or less unnoticed. In Damascus, though, Niccolò unfurls a bit, chatters in Latin, inspects the silks and the jewels while Yusuf lingers over spices he has not seen for too long and tapestries that remind him of his mother. Neither of them look at the girls at the edge of the marketplace. Neither of them look at the men, either. In fact, it seems that whenever Yusuf looks up, Niccolò is already waiting for him with something like a smile. And whenever Yusuf has to seek him out, Niccolò is sure to appear much sooner rather than later.

They go North from there, Yusuf following the stars and Niccolò trailing awkwardly after him, tripping over his own feet and looking every bit the dirty barbarian the Franks are supposed to be. Yusuf sometimes forgets that when he is clean and his hair is unknotted and his beard is not wild, Niccolò is, by certain standards (not Yusuf’s) really quite a beautiful man. The Persians, he’d realised once, would love him.

They reach Constantinople a year and a death each later. 

_Niccolò throws himself in front of Yusuf when they pass a band of robbers and bleeds to death in the dust. Yusuf gets himself a slit throat when they pass a group of Franks who mistakenly think Yusuf has captured Niccolò and has him as some form of slave._

_Niccolò is thunderous for a week after that. He slashes the Frank’s cross on his cloth covering with a quiet rage and then turns it inside out. It is a gash, a target, not a fluttering white flag, on his open back. The armour they both stowed into bags on their travelling donkey’s back is put on again and neither of them talk about it._

They are immortal, now, so they decide that they can stay awhile. Niccolò - somehow - has nimble fingers and an innocent face complete with a silver tongue, so money is not a problem; Yusuf dons the garbs of a merchant and they settle into a room in the older regions of the city. 

The proprietor had winked at them as she gave them the key and Yusuf had not realised that they had given the wrong impression until he's standing in the middle of the room and stared at the bedroll. Singular. 

It's spacious, he'll give it that, but nonetheless it is meant for two people willing to entangle together in sleep rather than whatever he and Niccolò are. 

Niccolò has no qualms about it, evidently. Yusuf would usually not have any either, but they were mistaken for nothing less than two people who _shared a bed_ and that could prove - worrying. 

"The woman thinks that we are bedding each other." Yusuf tells Niccolò's back as the man hunts for something in their belongings, face screwed up in a curious mix of confusion and concentration. Yusuf's heart skips and he does not really know why, so he dismisses it. 

Niccolò freezes. Stares at the wall he had been facing for a long moment before turning to face Yusuf, body a fluid wave of movement, something he's honed into perfection while he has been at Yusuf's side. 

"Although she is wrong to presume that, she does not know our names." He says slowly, his eyes not meeting Yusuf's. "She can hardly cause us harm, if she went as far as to provide us in such a manner-"

"I am not concerned about our current safety," Yusuf watches realisation dawn in Niccolò's expression, how his shoulders drop and then tense, how his mouth thins and quivers, his eyes narrowing and flickering, "for now, at least. Large cities have discretion. They have seen it all and we are nothing new, not that they know of. It worries me that if the good woman suspected that we are of Lot's spawn and acted upon it, then only God would know what could happen to us in other places, in other company."

Niccolò, surprisingly, shrugs.

"Well, she may have simply been continuing a trend, since we are not together. In any case, where I am from, it is not unusual for unmarried men to be with one another." He almost smiles, a brief narrowing of his eyes and a quirk of his very, very pink lips (they are like the roses adorning the gardens, back home, so many lives ago; just as delicate and just as finely coloured). "We are not married, you nor I, so we must protect each other against the charms of harlots and seductresses."

Then he winks and turns away again. Yusuf cannot help but gape.

"So it is..?"

Unfortunately, Niccolò slumps and it becomes clear that his speech was half a lie. Yusuf does not know why his heart plummets.

“The scriptures forbid man to lay with man,” Niccolò shrugs tersely, “it is considered a sin. Many would turn a blind eye, though, save for the strictest of the devout and those who seek to torment those they consider below them.”

“When you were a priest,” Yusuf stares intently at Niccolò’s half-turned face. If his soul were not so soft, his features would have made a fine eagle out of him. “When you were a priest, Niccolò. Would you have done that?”

A pause.

“Yes.” Niccolò straightens up, jerks his chin, and looks Yusuf dead in the eyes. The sky simmers hot between his eyelashes and if Yusuf were a man who still feared God, he would have thought that Niccolò di Genova carried a tamed apocalypse within him. If he still believed in a worthy God, he would have called Niccolò an angel. “Yes, I would have. God taught us to love with no judgement, and we all sin, one way or another. Besides, it is not man’s place to condemn man for sin, not when he too has sinned.”

“Do you still believe in God, then?”

“I will believe in God,” Niccolò blinks once, twice, and the fires go out, “until I will have a better answer to whatever we are. And I think that I will never get that answer, so I am content to consider that He exists.” The Frank remains silent for a moment, somber. “But do I believe in a merciful God? Do I believe in a just God? Do I believe in a fierce God? Do I believe in a God who is interested in man? No, I do not think that I do.”

The silence is filled with outside noise. The distant shouting in the market. Bells jingling. Singing. Boys laughing. 

The cloth over the window flutters limply.

“Do you?” Niccolò’s voice is almost a whisper. “Do you believe in a higher power, Yusuf?”

Yusuf thinks of his life. Thinks of everything he has ingrained into himself. Thinks of everything he had believed in, before this, before Niccolò had stabbed him after getting up off the ground, expression grim and very much _alive_ despite having been surely, _surely_ dead mere minutes ago.

“Ask me later.” He rasps, suddenly hoarse and unbalanced. “Then maybe I will have an answer for you.”

* * *

Yusuf wakes in the middle of the night. 

A cat yowls. A patrol clanks past, the sound of their armour unmistakable. But the overall realisation is that the heat is stifling.

Niccolò snuffles in his sleep. He curls in on himself during slumber, Yusuf has noticed, but what happens with that is he usually ends up on top of, or holding, Yusuf. 

Most of the time, it is hardly unpleasant. Yusuf does not mind the comfort of someone real and unyielding and constant lying by his side. Niccolò is pliant and beautiful in sleep, face far younger than his eyes and often downturned mouth make him out to be. 

He still has a faint, old scar across the bridge of his nose and little spots scattered across his skin. His eyelashes are longer than they are in the moonlight, and cast spiked shadows across his skin, over the sharp rises of his cheekbones. He twitches and makes infinitesimal noises under his breath and his arm draws ever tighter across Yusuf's waist. 

It is a comforting responsibility, holding still while Niccolò has his head pillowed on Yusuf's shoulder. The Frank’s horrendous hair is hardly _pleasant_ to feel against the sensitive skin of his neck but it is difficult to describe the emotion he feels when Niccolò lies on him like this, like a lover, almost. Like something to be protected and held, for a while.

That is, until it gets too hot. Their skin is sticking together in the summer air and Yusuf wrinkles his nose.

He unceremoniously extricates himself out of Niccolò’s grip, more or less expecting to rouse him. He still winces at the immediate sharp inhale he gets in response: his companion is now awake and sitting bolt upright.

Yusuf eyes him warily, waiting for a response that could range from swearing to confused, nearly gentle, concern. 

True to form, Niccolò mumbles something, intonation going up in a question.

“My apologies, but I do not speak the language of idiots.” Insults are an easy protection to fall back on, when it feels like this.

That gets him a distinctly unamused eye-roll. Niccolò rubs at his face tiredly, then repeats what he said in Greek: “Did I wake you?”

“We are more or less stuck together.” Yusuf tells him curtly and Niccolò snorts. “The heat is getting worse. I think that I can smell half the city by now - you most of all.”

“Half the world at least, and you are smelling yourself, not me.” Niccolò grumbles. “I am going back to sleep now, Yusuf. Do not dream of too many dogs.”

He gets a punch for that and Yusuf is in turn rewarded with a laugh. 

Niccolò seems to have the talent of being able to fall asleep quickly: within five minutes his breathing is even and deep.

But Yusuf cannot sleep. He stares at the ceiling and watches the moon cast thick shadows across the room. 

His chest is full. He feels a little like he cannot breathe; he wonders, can they die from disease? Has he caught a malady? Surely, this tightness, this inability to think in any linear fashion, is a symptom of a fever of some kind. 

No matter. Whatever will happen will happen, he supposes, watching Niccolò breathe. He - _they_ \- will deal with it as it comes. 

He rolls over and closes his eyes. As is more and more frequent these days, he has to push images of Niccolò out of his mind. Has to ignore the sparking sensation at the knowledge that the man is less than arm's reach away, that it would be so easy to-

He resolutely turns away from that trail of thought and forces himself into a fitful sleep.

* * *

“Next time,” Yusuf cheerfully informs a spitting Niccolò, “ _I_ am going to stab you with a flimsy sword and then shove garlic into your mouth.”

“And I will shove _my_ sword so far up your-”

“Your charms, they make me swoon.” Yusuf hauls him up by the back of his shirt and drags him outside, into the courtyard, where there are thankfully no passers-by to shudder to the side at the sight of two men covered in blood that is clearly not their own. “But please, shut your mouth before someone decides to kill you and pronounce you a demon. In the middle of a street. _Again_.”

“How was I supposed to know that he-”

“You are _supposed_ to keep your _head down and run if necessary_. We cannot just kill the entire city for seeing us for what we are!”

"We could try." Niccolò mutters darkly. 

Yusuf slaps him upside the head.

“Alright, I did run!” Niccolò spreads his hands indignantly. Yusuf would find it amusing if he were not so preoccupied with the fact that this is the second time in as many weeks and they should probably move out of Constantinople before the entire city comes to hang them under the presumption that they are consorting with each other as well as the devil. “I ran but then he _caught me_ because his mother was a dog and his father was a Roman goat-”

Whatever he was about to say is lost to enraged spluttering as Yusuf dumps him onto the cobblestone and throws a bucket of water over his head.

“Wash the blood out.” He says shortly, filling the bucket with more water and glaring at Niccolò. “Then you can tell me all about Roman goats.”

Niccolò spits at him, mumbling unpleasant sounding insults under his breath in his native tongue. He looks like a murderous street cat, hissing and flat-eared, what with the way his hair is plastered to his face and how his lips are peeling back into a snarl. His sodden tunic sticks to his chest and to a waist that is more slender than Yusuf had cared to notice before.

The man is usually mild tempered, gentle at the best of times - even an encounter with a former compatriot should not cast such an ill temper onto him.

“Niccolò,” Yusuf hands the bucket over the Frank and watches him start to wash up, “Niccolò, tell me why you are in such a foul mood.”

Niccolò doesn't reply at first, instead choosing to stick his head into the bucket. 

“He insinuated that I am whoring myself out.” Niccolò scrubs violently at his hair, pinkish brown water running down his pale skin. “That is the first thing he said. The second is that he told me that my mother had slept with the devil, that I was not only a bastard but demon spawn too, and so a coward, and then he-”

Yusuf waits.

“Then he _insulted_ you by calling you a-”

Here he makes a low, wounded and very _angry_ noise and promptly submerges his head under the water again.

Yusuf decides not to pry, although something inside him warms that Niccolò is this furious because some Frank decided to insult _him_.

“We have to leave.” He had not expected it to be so soon, knows Niccolò did not either, so he gives him a clap on the shoulder before stepping away. “If they know about the both of us, we are not safe and I do not think either of us want to cause any more... _fuss_. Sort yourself out, Niccolò. I will get our things.”

They are out of the city by midnight. 

The sky burns red. With their usual timing, Constantinople does too. 

They watch it for a second, then look at each other: Niccolò’s expression is terrible to behold, his anger, which had ebbed away over the course of the evening, coming back full force. 

_They have to help. It is how things are meant to be._

* * *

Yusuf dreams of fire and screams and smoke and burning for months afterwards. Niccolò screams on a loop inside his head, his hand reaching for Yusuf but never quite making it. 

He wakes up every time with tears down his face and a name dying on his lips. Niccolò is always there, though. He is always there and his hands are blessedly cold and he clutches at Yusuf just as Yusuf wants to hold Niccolò and never let him go.

* * *

Yusuf realises that he is in love in the mountains. 

It is colder than he is used to. Niccolò does not seem to mind, although he sometimes shivers in his (stolen) clothes like a drowned rat. 

For the four years - or is it six? ten? he cannot tell and he does not care how long it is, so long as Niccolò is by his side - that they have been travelling, most of his contemplative thoughts have fallen into one of two categories. The first is their Affliction and everything that goes with it.

The second is, of course, Niccolò di Genova and everything about him.

Physically Niccolò is, by Yusuf’s standards, hardly the pinnacle of beauty. His eyes are foreign and their colour is not warm, too light to be particularly attractive - at first, they had seemed cold, unearthly in the worst possible way. His hair, when short, sticks out like a baby bird’s, and is also paler than Yusuf is used to, much like his skin and those damn eyes. He is everything a Frank should be and everything Yusuf’s (former) people are not. 

He is graceful at times. More often than not his anger makes him into a coiled snake, ready to strike at the perfect moment - there is an elegance to him that Yusuf cannot help but admire. 

When he is at ease he becomes something familiar. An oddly shaped, soft and lovable creature that trips over its own feet and swears in a language that Yusuf is picking up far better than Niccolò is with Yusuf’s own tongue. Niccolò’s smiles are gentle and warm, his spirit much the same, save for those ferocious moments. 

But for all that, he makes Yusuf’s chest _hurt_ . His mind does not know what to make of this endless, useless _yearning_ that consumes his soul and sets his head on fire, makes limb, every fingertip, every breath spark with something he cannot define.

(Niccolò never seems to notice Yusuf’s affliction. Perhaps that is a good thing, that he does not know that he is the centre of an earthquake, the source of the fever.)

The logical conclusion is of a passing infatuation. Niccolò has become Yusuf’s closest companion - it would be understandable.

But it never fades. Yusuf waits and waits and _waits_ for it to pass but every time Niccolò turns to give him a smile, or brushes past him, or holds him, or sings quietly under his breath or talks or simply _is_ \- the flames are stoked higher. 

Yusuf feels himself burning. Niccolò may be more of a full moon, sparkling and steady, but he is also Yusuf’s sun, he is Yusuf’s stars and sky and the ground underneath his feet. He has, steadily and surely, become nothing short of Yusuf’s world, his _everything._

For that, he is the most beautiful thing on Earth.

And so, Yusuf stands on the edge of a precipice in the mountain range, watching the rocks clatter into the ravine below, and realises that this is how he loves Niccolò. Dangerously, inevitably, ever falling further and waiting to be dashed to pieces for it.

They walk further into the mountains, staying quiet so that their voices don’t echo and cause a rockfall, then set up camp in a secure cave. Yusuf cannot think straight, dizzy with the epiphany, drowning in the enormous realisation as if it is the ocean.

“You were a priest, before.” He starts over their meager evening meal, breaking the hours-long companionable silence. He knows exactly where he is going with this, and it terrifies him.

Niccolò nods, chewing. “And you were a lordling.”

“You never had a lover?” Yusuf does not know why he wants an answer. It could hurt him. It could bless him. But he has asked for it, nonetheless, with a cheerfulness that sounds false to his own ears.

Niccolò goes oddly tense. In all their years of knowing each other, this has, for whatever reason, never been a topic to come up. It had been an oddly painful subject to bring up. Niccolò had stayed quiet about it, too.

“Not exactly.” His tone is cautious. “I have never courted anyone, if that is what you are asking.”

“So why a priest?”

Niccolò still looks like a hunted animal. Yusuf does not understand why.

“I was never interested in women,” he takes a bite out of his food and stares into the fire, cheeks reddening from what must be the cold, “and I was a bastard, no good for proper work, and so the monastery seemed like the only viable option for me.”

“No pretty women for the pretty Niccolò?” Yusuf teases, and realises only too late that he called Niccolò _pretty_. “Then why ‘not exactly’?”

Thankfully, Niccolò does not comment on being called ‘pretty’. He does turn ever redder (Yusuf would like to compare him to a rose, but that would be a lie - Niccolò is far more to look at than a rose or any flower will ever be), though, ever an enigma. 

“No.” His voice is oddly choked and a halting realisation hits Yusuf like a slap to the face. “No women, Yusuf, I had- I always... What I mean to say, is that I, I preferred - prefer - the company of men.”

The silence is deafening. Niccolò’s eyes are wide, lips thinned into a fearful grimace. Yusuf watches his hands shake. 

“Would it be wrong of me,” Yusuf starts, slow, unsure how to go about things he has thought about often but never managed to say out loud, “to say that while I have never laid with neither man nor woman, I have thought of both?”

_Especially you. Only you._

Niccolò stares into the fire. His voice is low, so low, when he speaks. “You jest.”

“I do not.”

“Well then.” He straightens out, looks at Yusuf a little fearfully, warily, still unsure, but whatever Niccolò finds in his face seems to satisfy him, so he smiles, a quivering little thing. “That is that, I suppose."

And that is, indeed, that.

Yusuf feels no less. Niccolò remains at his side. 

But Yusuf does not take Niccolò’s hand in his, does not cup his face, does not kiss him and does not run his hands over Niccolò’s skin. He does not press him into a thin bedroll to kiss him senseless and make him squirm. 

He will not do those things. No matter how strong the temptation is, he will not.

The dreams continue. The women both he and Niccolò dream of seem to be closer, standing in familiar territories. In Yusuf’s dreams, Niccolò smiles a smile that drips heat and makes him _want_ , he lets Yusuf call him _Nicco_ and _love_ and _my angel_ and any endearments that care to spill from his mouth.

Not dying has made both of them brave. But not dying has made Yusuf a coward, too.

* * *

_“You love him.” Andromache had said, within days of her knowing him. “You love him and he loves you, and yet you do nothing?”_

_Yusuf shrugged, pained. “I do not think it is possible for him to love me as much as I love him. He is my other half. He is the world, and he is everything in between. He is my home and the place I long to reach.”_

_She looked at him, with eyes not unlike and yet so different to Niccolò’s. The same colour with a different soul._

_“Do not deceive yourself.” Then she had smiled, a knife-like thing. “You will come around eventually.”_

* * *

Quynh and Andromache are lovers.

It is hardly surprising. Niccolò barely bats an eye and calmly eats his food as they kiss and sit close to each other. Yusuf itches to have what they have: to be able to touch so easily, to trade kisses, exchange heated looks.

Niccolò sits close to him, but it is not the same. Yusuf wants to weep with both joy and agony every time their thighs brush whenever they sit close enough together, but he does not have the heart to move away. He purposefully brushes their knuckles together, leaves his hand there as if by accident, and feels his heart leap into his throat whenever Niccolò does not move away. 

Niccolò’s body is always burning against his, a brand. Every touch makes Yusuf’s head spin and his heart speed up, a stallion in his chest.

He steals these touches whenever he can. He kisses his fingers before brushing them against Niccolò’s shoulders and does not think of pressing his mouth there. (He does. All the time, when they’re not fighting for something bigger, and even then he still thinks of Niccolò more often than not).

From there, they travel as a four. Many must take them for two pairs of lovers, when in reality there are only one and a half. 

Andromache stabs a man taking advantage of a woman and Quynh kisses her for it; Yusuf has to look away, over to his own love, finding Niccolò looking right at him. 

They share a smile, affectionate. The two women are already sisters to them and despite it having been a few weeks at best, the familial love is strong. Andromache likes to make a giggling boy out of Niccolò, brushing her fingers up and down his sides in a way that makes him laugh and kick at her, and when she stops and he calms down, she kisses his forehead. She goes for Yusuf, afterwards, and it is worth everything to see the way Niccolò smiles at him, gleeful and full of laughter.

Quynh teases them in her own way. Spins them tales about Andromache that make them cough, steals their things and inspects their weapons, questions them and narrows her eyes at every answer. She bullies swearing out of them both, delighting in their yelping and cut-off obscenities.

She is gone, though, a month into them knowing each other. Andromache does not seem to mind.

“It is our game,” she explains, nonchalantly, when they - Niccolò and Yusuf - wake up and search for Quynh in a panic, “one of us runs, the other follows. You cannot keep the wind in a bottle.”

They travel together for a week after that and then Andromache is gone, too.

Niccolò laughs it off, lays a gentle hand on Yusuf's shoulder. “They will find us, Yusuf, just as they will find each other.”

For all his worrying about it, Yusuf does not doubt him.

He does not think he ever could.

* * *

The bandits come from behind.

They only manage to fight off about half of them before one manages to catch Yusuf's head and slice it back, back-

-his consciousness returns slightly prior to his ability to breathe. Niccolò is holding him tightly, two hands on either sides of Yusuf's neck, almost holding him together (Yusuf is clay in his hands. Niccolò could make anything out of him). 

He is speaking, too, _pleading_ , whispering and then begging in a tearful voice.

“Yusuf, Yusuf, _please_ , come back to me, come back, Yusuf-”

His chest explodes with oxygen and he heaves, coughing and choking. 

Sight returns. Niccolò’s hands are gentle over Yusuf's face, a juxtaposition to the way they smear blood over his skin and the way his skin is pale under a slathering of the same. His eyes are filled with something like tears and his mouth is trembling in what could be prayer.

“Nicco.” Yusuf gasps, because he is back from the dead once again and he cannot think straight. “ _Nicco_.”

He does not know why this moment has them both like this. Maybe it is the constant fear of _will it end this time? Will this be the last time?_ or perhaps it is something else.

Niccolò looks at him with a face full of grief and then, with one last noise of mourning, he drops down onto his elbows and steals Yusuf's mouth with his lips.

He pulls away too soon, skin going as red as the blood covering it. His hands shake even more on Yusuf’s cheeks, clammy and sticking to the skin, but he does not take them off, does not pull away.

“I apologise-” he starts.

Yusuf cuts him off with a hand on Niccolò’s own cheek. His soul has been set ablaze and he cannot get enough oxygen into his lungs to fuel its fire.

“Kiss me again.” He rasps. “Nicco. Niccolò. _Kiss me_.”

Niccolò does. 

He tastes of rust and blood, dust and dirt and too many hours in the open road.

They pull apart. Niccolò rests his forehead against Yusuf's and breathes, air puffing over Yusuf's lips, air that he drinks in greedily.

“Yusuf.” Niccolò whispers. His voice breaks and his eyes are open so wide, Yusuf can see every fine detail in them, can note every filament. “ _Yusuf_.”

“You say my name like no-one else has.” He reaches up and tangles his own hand in Niccolò's hair, like he's always wanted to do. Then the words come pouring out of him like a river. “I am yours, Niccolò. I am yours for eternity, I love you, my moon, my sun, my stars and my sky, I _love you_ -”

He says it in every language he can think of and Niccolò shakes apart above him.

“Yusuf,” he is quiet, but even one word from Niccolò di Genova is a lightning bolt to Yusuf's chest, “Yusuf, I love you more than I have words for. I am yours, just as you are mine. Until the very end, you have me, I swear it on the foundations of this world.”

“Nicco.” He breathes, watching the man’s eyelashes flutter, his gaze flicker. “Oh, my Nicco.”

He gets a kiss for that, on his nose. 

He smiles and says it again, sly. “My Nicco.”

Another kiss, on his forehead this time. 

Every time he drops his love's name, he gets a gentle, reverent kiss on his face, on his hand, on his palm. 

Then Niccolò smiles, wide and brilliant, and as soon as his lips stop forming Yusuf's name they're kissing again. 

Yusuf slides his hands to his lover's waist and yanks him, sharp, onto his chest, letting him languor there. Niccolò makes a low noise in his throat and scrambles into a sitting position, one hand on Yusuf's chest, right over his heart, and the other next to his head. 

Yusuf cannot look away. Niccolò leans down and kisses him again.

“Say my name again.” Yusuf feels drunk. The world is spinning around Niccolò's head: he is the centre of Yusuf's everything. He _is_ Yusuf's everything. _Kiss me, kiss me, kiss me and I will never breathe any air other than that which is in your lungs ever again,_ “Say it, Niccolò, Nicco, my Niccolò-”

“Yusuf,” it is whispered against his neck like a prayer. “Yusuf, _Yusuf_.”

And so he laughs, and he laughs, and Niccolò does too, little gasping sobs, his tears making streaks out of the blood. 

“We are a pair of fools.” he murmurs after they have quieted.

“Lovestruck fools.” Yusuf corrects him and watches Niccolò smile.

“Yes.” He bumps his nose with Yusuf’s, exhaling against his lips and then resting his forehead against Yusuf’s cheek. “Love makes fools of us all.”

“It does.”

“And you are the biggest fool of us all, Yusuf,” Niccolò’s tone is chiding and Yusuf groans, ever dramatic, at the teasing, “you must have been blind and deaf and dumb to not know how much I loved you.”

“You are as much a fool as I am, Nicco.” It is endearing, watching Niccolò blush and duck his head away at both the nickname and the words themselves. “Surely I have been looking at you like you had been the one to paint the skies and raise the earth?”

“It was no different to how you usually looked at me.” Niccolò looks up, sudden, getting back up onto his arms above Yusuf’s head. And then, quiet, like a distant clap of thunder: “ _Oh_.”

“We have loved each other all these years,” Yusuf cannot help but wonder - both at his stupidity and the sheer weight of the realisation that Niccolò _loves him back_ , loves him back _just as much_. “Fools are we.”

Above him, Niccolò smiles, a proper sunrise breaking out over his face.

“Yes.” Niccolò says again, and kisses him again, still smiling.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed and thank you so much for reading! (kudos and comments are very much appreciated <3)
> 
> Come chat, ask me stuff, vibe and/or yell at or with me [here!](https://thedisasternerd.tumblr.com/)


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